Advances in LanguageAI: What’s next for Smartling in 2026

AI translation is evolving quickly, and we’re excited about where it’s headed.

If you joined our year-end roadmap session, you probably felt the same energy. Andrew Saxe, our VP of Product, and Olga Beregovaya, our VP of AI, walked through where LanguageAI is going next—and why these updates matter for the teams that rely on Smartling every day.

You’re juggling more content, more formats, more channels, and more languages than ever before. And while AI has made parts of this work easier, it has also introduced new complexity. So, our focus heading into 2026 is simple: give you smarter tools that help you move faster, work more efficiently, and feel confident in every translation that gets published. 

If you missed the live session, you can watch the full roadmap walkthrough on demand to see these updates in action.

Delivering the best first translation, every time

Let’s be honest: the first draft matters. When the first output is strong, everything gets easier—fewer edits, fewer back-and-forths, faster launches, and far less stress across the team.

That’s why we redesigned how AI translation works behind the scenes. Instead of depending on a single engine, we pull from multiple Machine Translation (MT) and LLM providers, run each output through hallucination detection, compare how they perform, and automatically choose the strongest one. 

We’re also giving you more control over how AI behaves. Our new prompt tooling with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) lets you guide translations using your own Translation Memory (TM) examples, glossary terms, and style preferences. Automated style guides turn your content into consistent rules that shape tone and brand voice. And our upcoming LQA Agent gives you instant, scalable quality checks on every translation—no more relying on small samples or guesswork.

All of this is designed to give you what Olga described as “the best first translation every time”: higher quality, deeper confidence, and less cleanup work.

Accessing Smartling wherever you work

If there’s one thing that slows teams down, it’s the nonstop context switching between tools. So we’re doing the opposite: bringing Smartling to you.

With our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, you can translate content, retrieve strings, or kick off actions directly inside AI chat or coding tools like VS Code and Claude Code. No switching tabs, no copy/paste. 

We’re also improving how content moves across your systems. You’ll see new webhooks, new developer tools like key-value management, and new/upgraded connectors for platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom Help Center, Google Drive, Zapier, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Figma. And we’re introducing even more integrations for design, e-commerce, and project management tools so teams can push and pull content without friction.

If it feels like you're constantly context-switching, these updates will feel like a major relief.

Giving you a simpler, more intuitive experience

Smartling is also investing in something every team appreciates: a smoother, more intuitive platform.

The redesigned AI Hub gives you one clear place to manage your machine translation engines, AI translation providers, any AI translation prompts, and settings. Updates to people management, workflow assignments, and user profiles make it easier to keep your teams organized as you scale.

We’re strengthening governance too. New capabilities will support glossary suggestions, translation and terminology consistency checks, Translation Memory (TM) quality checks, and more flexible linguistic asset permissioning. We’re also introducing key value management to help you keep translations stable across codebases, even when source text changes.

And to help you manage more of your global content in one place, we’re expanding support for transcription, subtitling, video and audio, multilingual image generation, and better design-to-file mapping. Whether your teams work in Figma, InDesign, or code repositories, the goal is to make the entire process feel more connected and more governed.

What this means for your teams

When you zoom out, the vision becomes clear:

• You’ll see higher quality right from the start.
• You’ll spend less time fixing things and more time shipping.
• Your brand voice will stay consistent across markets.
• Your designers, developers, marketers, and localization teams will feel more 
  supported.
• You’ll have more confidence in every translation that leaves your hands.

That’s where we’re headed—and we’re excited to bring all of that to you in the year ahead.

If you missed the live session, you can watch the full roadmap walkthrough on demand—it’s the best way to see everything in action.